Thursday, April 27, 2017

Fantastical Fictions Book Club: Fardwor, Russia! by Oleg Kashin

It's time again for another Fantastical Fictions Book Club. On Thursday, May 5 at 7:00 p.m., we'll convene around the big table at Malvern Books to discuss Oleg Kashin's Fardwor, Russia!

This slim novel is a fascinating breezy read, if you can call a dark, satiric dystopia "breezy." It offers a glimpse of Russian culture and its complaints. The publisher's website describes the book this way:

"When a scientist experimenting on humans in a sanatorium near Moscow gives a growth serum to a dwarf oil mogul, the newly heightened businessman runs off with the experimenter’s wife, and a series of mysterious deaths and crimes commences. Fantastical, wonderfully strange, and ringing with the echoes of real-life events, this political parable fused with science fiction has an uncanny resonance with today’s Russia under Putin. Oleg Kashin is a notorious Russian journalist and activist who, in 2010, two months after he’d delivered the manuscript of this book to his publishers, was beaten to within an inch of his life in an attack with ties to the highest levels of government. While absurdly funny on its face, Fardwor, Russia! A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin is deadly serious in its implications. Kashin’s experience exemplifies why so few authors dare to criticize the state—and his book is a testament of the power of literature to break the bonds of power, corruption, and enforced silence."

"Absurdity is piled upon absurdity, but none of it is taken as anything but a matter of course by anyone involved. There is a long tradition of this sort of storytelling in Russia. From Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" in pre-Soviet times to Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" and onward, writers have had to address the insanity of their society through indirect or fabulist means. "Fardwor" is no fairy tale. Kashin grounds his story in everyday reality. Karpov finds out his wife has left him because she has unfriended him on Facebook; the oligarch, Kirill, is named to head the organization charged with making the upcoming Olympics in Sochi a success."